Posted
by
timothyon Monday February 01, 2010 @09:13AM
from the end-thats-inn-kanada dept.

innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."

Some say, that Idiocracy [imdb.com] was a documentary sent back from the future. And that The Man needs a dumbed-down populace to keep the likes of Walmart and the current political system in business. All we know is that popular culture emphasizes dumbness over intelligence. Welcome to 2010.

Other than having electrolytes, you know what the scariest thing about Idiocracy is? Every year that passes since it's release, that future seems not only more possible, but more probable.

My fiance thinks the future will be a combination of Wall-E and Idiocracy, but whatever...it's not looking good -_-;;

What's really fun about these two comments is that each contain the sort of error that TFA references: "Some say, that Idiocracy" (parmesan comma) and "since it's release" ('its', the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun, does not require an apostrophe). (I'll overlook the emoticon, since this isn't a formal paper, so I would argue it's less inappropriate here.)

I wouldn't feel bad.
My personal theory is that when taking part in conversations like this it's the verbal part of our brain, not the usual writing part, that's used. Hence mistakes like writing "it's" when you mean "its" and vice-versa and "there" or "their" or "they're" because to your verbal brain they sound the same and therefore are.
People's use of "cuz" and "lol" and "wtf" in sentences is also explained by my theory. I suspect they talk that way as well, they're just morons.

That may be true. However, when you're writing a message calling out grammatical errors in something written by someone else, you should reread it before sending to avoid Muphry's Law [wikipedia.org]. And yes, I reread this post several times but that doesn't guarantee I avoided Muphry's Law myself.

Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.

As Winston Churchill famously said, "this is something up with which I will not put!"

Remember one simple fact: the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences. The only "skills" required to get a Ph.D are (a) access to enough money to exist as a student for the requisite time, (b) the ability to regurgitate what your professors wish to hear, and (c) the ability to attach oneself to a previous Ph.D recipient long enough to have one's hand held through the process of writing a thesis.

I know too many Ph.D's who cannot tell the difference between its/it's, there/they're/their, and other simple homonyms. These people also have absolutely no concept of the value of money and are more than willing to give a passing grade to papers and assignments that contain similar grammatical mistakes as mentioned by TFA and the parent post.

As regards Idiocracy, while hyperbolic, it definitely does call attention to a growing concern for Western society. The lowest-intelligence portions of our society increasingly sit as dependent breeding stock, suckling at the teat of government social programs generationally whilst producing an overabundance of mentally deficient young who then perpetuate the cycle. Diseases perpetuated only by reckless or ignorant behavior that should have no foothold in a modern society are instead coming back in force, due to these idiots insisting that "well there will be a cure in the next 10 years so I don't have to worry" (actual quote from one of these morons who passed on HIV to one of her kids in the womb).

Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it. Enforcing classroom discipline and removing troubled and disruptive children have become impossible. Properly stratified classes that truly challenge and educate the best and brighest children, while placing the lesser intellects into properly focused remedial programs, are seen as "discriminatory" if a given district strays too far from the racial numbers that racial supremacist agitators want to see. In the name of "diversity", all children are instead randomly tossed into classrooms that move at the pace of the slowest idiot, causing the education of the truly intelligent to be stunted. In most cases, creativity and intelligence - two innate talents that should be encouraged at all costs - are instead actively stifled by jealous teachers who are themselves the dimmest bulbs of their own generation (remember, the average IQ of college students in Education-related degree programs is lower even than Communications or Physical Education programs). Entrenched, unqualified individuals (tenured teachers and teachers' unions) insist that an unregulated and unfocused "more money for Education", rather than properly spent money combined with the elimination of unqualified individuals and proven-ineffective teaching doctrines from the system, is the solution.

And of course programs proven to nurture intelligence and leadership are then attacked as well. Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget. Programs like the Young Democrats and Young Republicans have all but vanished, a true shame since these programs did much to teach young men and women to engage in civil disagreement (as well as community engagement and good citizenship!) rather than the partisan hackery that is all young children learn today from television shows. Music and fine arts programs have been vanishing all over the country, victims to both the "more money for test scores" problem and the growth, overadulation and overfunding of "sports" (specifically, football and basketball) which rely more on the physical grotesqueness of one or two "team stars" than an ability on the part of players to react to different situations as a team.

Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget.

That's quite a screed you've got there. I agree with some of it, and find a lot of it a little shrill. This bit I quoted kinda stuck in my craw though. I agree that programs *like* boy & girl scouts of america are a good idea. The problem for me is when the scouts shot themselves in the foot by trying to defend anti-gay policies.

I know that isn't an attitude I want drilled into my kids. No thanks. We have enough of that from our fathers. The molesters you have to look out for are almost never the out gays. It's just more gay-bashing clothed in the appearance of thinking of the children.

Maybe you should get involved with the scout leadership and get the thing on track again. It sounds like a paramilitary christian training camp to most people, I think.

Although I agree with the sentiment, the BSA was likely never a strictly secular program. I can't say for sure about the first few months after its creation, as it was a private organization from February 1910 through April 1910, at which point control was taken over by the YMCA, emphasis on the C for Christian. The Scout Oath includes the line "To do my duty to God," and thousands of packs, with hundreds of thousands of members, are organized by churches.

Again, while I disagree with the anti-gay rhetoric of the BSA, it's important to note that this is a case of secular society attempting to "hijack" a semi-religious program.

the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences

That's utterly false. Only the most Mickey-Mouse universities would award a Ph.D to someone who couldn't effectively write a dissertation or academic paper. The ability to effectively communicate is critical for academics and they are, in general, very well-spoken individuals who can clearly express ideas both within and outside their area of expertise. Good scientific writing requires clear, concise and understandable grammar.

Shakespeare... if he was sitting one of these courses, he'd probably fail by the same criteria

Doubtful, since Shakespeare actually knew the language, and could use it. He used slang and nonproper words for literary effect, and not because he didn't know any better. These students don't actually know English, Shakespeare did, the comparison is false.

These commas may be the result of the international adoption of English as the "lingua franca". In German (and possibly other languages), that comma would be correct. Many non-native English speaking and writing people learn from online conversations, which are often informal and written in an oral style. They learn from each other and so some of the rules in their native languages cross over into their English and into other people's English.

'its', the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun, does not require an apostrophe

That's an irregularity which can be real problem for non-native writers as well. The possessive form is normally created by appending apostrophe-s, so it's only natural to write "it's". The collision with the short form of "it is" is not apparent, especially when you use a formal writing style and avoid these short forms.

Basically, grammar is less a formal series of rules for better writing, and is more a formal series of rules for petty "one-upmanship" among writers.

No, grammar is, a formal means of, determining what a set of writing means when you cant ask the writer what it means cuz hes not standing their in front of u i wish people wood rite better use punctuation good. Grammer and spelling well.
If u write a letter and only way reader has to find out weather you meant "Man eats dog" or "Dog eats man", it helps to half written in formal universally excepted whey.

If you try to deconstruct that sentence, it really has no definite meaning. You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.

No, it has a perfectly definite meaning, because it's a perfectly grammatical sentence in Black Vernacular English. "Be" is used to construct the habitual present tense [wikipedia.org]. This isn't discarding verb conjugation, it's using an additional conjugation that you don't happen to have in your own dialect. Note that if you replace this particular construct with what you think is a "reasonable conjugation" (say, changing "I be working" to "I am working") you'll misunderstand the sentence.

There's no global dumb-people-breeding conspiracy and every one of these kids has the ability for higher learning. The sad fact is there's a growing percentage that's never had to try in an education system where no-one fails.

Why learn proper english when the alternative nets you the same result and more free time?

What's the problem? I blame teachers' unions. When it's impossible to fire an idiot who has no business in the classroom, you end up with a generation of idiots. My 11-year old son has a better grasp of the subjective vs. the objective ("who" vs. "whom") than his English teacher; and at a social function a few years ago I had an English teacher tell me that "Speedily is not a word" (Firefox disagrees, as it did not put the little red spellcheck line underneath it). These two women are just two among countless examples of people with no clue on how language works, but are tasked with teaching the elements of language to children.

I blame parents (though not the type you seem to be). When I was going through primary school, I was that little boy with a better grasp of things than many of my teachers. Looking at my experiences and those of my sister, I know that children can go through lousy school systems and come out smart and educated regardless. It is certainly the job of a school's teachers to teach, but I believe the majority factor in a child's success comes from the home environment.

There has been plenty of effort to try to improve the education of students through wide programs imposed on teachers and schools, and plenty of time to see that such attempts are problematic at best. Red tape goes both ways, and competent teachers aren't automatically able to fail a student for using "cuz" in an English class (as opposed to just marking them down, resulting in the student getting enough credit in the end for a D). I'm not suggesting abandoning school reform, but personally I'm ready to see more fingers pointed at the parents of failing students. School is important, and, barring learning disabilities, for the most part easy. Good parents naturally foster that perspective. When I read about university students using "cuz" in academic papers, I wonder about the idiots managed to raised a child who could possibly think that is correct or appropriate.

My sophomore year of high school I walked into my English class and started writing. My mind took over and, before I realized it, my I's were uncapitalized, my words were abbreviated, and many words were misspelled for the purpose of shortening. That summer I had spent more time on instant messenger programs than I had in past years. Without realizing it, my mind was setup to use Internet speak. The rules of grammar were still there, somewhere. They were hard to access, though. It was a struggle to get myself to start writing coherently. Since then, I've switched my style and have been trying to maintain proper grammar throughout all of my text conversations.

This was 2003

This is going to naturally happen in any situation in which people develop a shorthand language. I doubt teaching grammar in schools will help because most students will forget the rules before college. I question if there really is a solution to this outside of individuals taking notice and attempting to fix their mistakes.

Well, really, you're doing it for yourself, and not for other people who won't bother. Actually, I've found that some of the people you talk to will either subconsciously - or through want of improvement - pick up their skirts at least a little bit.

The solution to that problem is adequately described by the sibling poster. Proper grammar and spelling can easily be used in all of the text-based forums you frequent, be they Slashdot, Twitter, text messages, or IM's.

Shortening "you" to "u," not capitalizing "i," leaving out periods, and so on are techniques I've frequently attributed to being a style that slow typists use to save time. However--unless, of course, you type with single-digit WPM--the amount of time saved by omitting what's usually no more than 5 keystrokes in a single sentence is so small that it doesn't even begin to eclipse the abnormally short attention spans of us internet generation folks.

If formal documents are written according to a certain set of rules while the average teenager write as he or she sees fit then it is clear that the average teenager is the one who is wrong. Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable. When you add numerous typos due to pure laziness ("wat gsu men u odn unsterna?!! lrn 2 raeed ckocglnbi faget!!1") the end result is not only unreadable but also completely without any kind of consistency, learning how one person communicates in "txt speek" rarely aides in the understanding of "txt speek" written by another individual.

You know what is the most terrifying?I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.

Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.

People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.

People in England learn the street language and never get taught the grammar.

In online chat it's comical how often you can tell the 'Continental European speaking English' as opposed to the 'Native Brit or Irish person' purely from their superior grammar and spelling. That's particularly true for the younger age groups.

Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit

Hence the current Facebook protests that an exam asked questions that they hadn't been specifically taught the answers to. A comment quoted on national news was "that's 6 months of attending lessons wasted."

This worries me. People shouldn't be taught the test answers, they should be taught the basics in the subject and how to learn. The whole UK education system appears to be increasingly broken, and that (even more than the Government putting us into record debt) threatens the viability of the nation for the next few decades.

You know what is the most terrifying?
I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.
If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.

Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.

That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose".

The tests and their failure to guarantee competence when passed is a natural result of the exaggerated and undue emphasis that schools place on memorization by rote. If you had a perfect photographic memory, you would breeze through most any modern school curriculum. That doesn't mean you'd actually understand what you have memorized or be able to adapt that knowledge to different situations.

We have created something of a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy: the standardized test dictates what the students are taught, so according to that test the students have learned. Nowhere in this do you find a regard for whether they have any real mastery of that knowledge. They're just being taught to regurgitate information with no real understanding and I could teach a parrot to do that. Writing in particular is generally a creative process. It has mechanical elements but does not really lend itself to mechanized repetition; it's not like operating a machine. It's no surprise to me that this is where the incompetence is most evident.

"Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level," says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.

AHHHH!!!! It's percent not per cent!!

British English vs. American English. From Wikipedia: In British English, percent is sometimes written as two words (per cent, although percentage and percentile are written as one word). [...] The form "per cent." is still in use as a part of the highly formal language found in certain documents like commercial loan agreements (particularly those subject to, or inspired by, common law), as well as in the Hansard transcripts of British Parliamentary proceedings. While the term has been attributed to Latin per centum, this is a pseudo-Latin construction and the term was likely originally adopted from the French pour cent.

Hmmm, it seems my American upbringing has influenced my ability to recognize an acceptable form of the word percent. I offer the following from TFA to vindicate myself:

"If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."

This should read "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, or verb tenses,then that's a problem.

"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

This should read "Punctuation errors, particularly those regarding the proper use of apostrophes, are a huge problem"

"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is

This should read "I get their essays and I think, 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is'."

"It would say to me... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

This run on sentence has many inappropriately used commas.

"You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn't as not as good as previous ones," he notes.

At this point, is our decline even reversible? I could draw some parallels with history (as I have in past posts) --- but what would be the point? We'll just have more people argue that education is worthless [slashdot.org], or say how it's all the fault of teachers' unions, or argue that we need more charter schools.

So, we point fingers, scream, and ape talking points while our society crumbles around us. What's the point?

We're already the laughingstock of the world; the next generation actually looks worse than the boomers do, and that's an accomplishment. Screw this: I'm getting out. There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.

as long as i can remember, the next generation has always looked worse than the previous generation. mostly because they did thing differently. generation X was said to be lazy 15 years ago because they sat around with their computers all the time instead of working in a factory

Currently, younger generations have been texting and chatting on internet as soon as they began to be able to write phonetically. To their great joy, communication worked well between them even without this fancy 'grammar' grown-ups brag about. We were told that one should not write unless he writes correctly, because the writing skills we were given have the idea that you always write for some kind of "serious" publication. We never were taught to write for text messages.

I am not sure whether this indicates a lowering of level or just a change in the way the world works. Latin got obsoleted in "serious" scientific publications. Could correct English become obsolete in the same way ? As long as the arguments themselves are well constructed, I see no qualms in that. As long as communication works, the preservation of language for the sake of it serves no purpose, IMHO (if you allow me to use such acronyms, lol).

To their great joy, communication worked well between them even without this fancy 'grammar' grown-ups brag about.

Plenty of flamewars get started due to miscommunication when someone either says something that they don't mean to say, or tries to compress an idea too much and winds up making a vague statement that can be interpreted in different, or even conflicting, ways. It's easy enough to do this with "correct" or formal writing.

Poke around in the comments section of YouTube and you'll find that this new mode communication isn't really working well, even for the people who use it regularly. It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.

As you imply in your last paragraph, if someone wants to simplify grammar, it needs to be done in such a way that functionality is not lost.

I would say that it would be more likely that proper English would be taught in the same way that cursive is: cool to know and useful in rare circumstances but not relevant most of the time.

That can be really dangerous though. In all of science, engineering, medicine, history, and philosophy it is important to be extremely precise in your wording in order to properly convey ideas. If you don't teach people the necessary language tools to do this early on then they will have a much higher barrier to enter these fields and we will have even more trouble pushing innovation forward.

First of all, let's look at baselines and samples and that sort of question. If we administered a test to college freshman in 1910 and compared the results to college freshman of 2010, we'd be mortified if we looked at the percentage that passed some benchmark. But suppose we ask the question "if we took the top N students from each era, what percentage would meet some arbitrary level of proficiency". Now take N to be the number of ALL college freshman in 1910. 2010 would kick 1910's butt, because there are VASTLY more people going to college today.

Now, let's look as sampling. Suppose we administered the test every year for five years to some institution, and nothing fundamental changes about the world. Would we expect to get 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%? Of course not. It'd go up and down a few percentage points. It might go something like 30%, 24%, 23%, 29%, 25%, even if nothing had changed.

The fact that the test went from 30% to 25% over the course of several years immediately tells us that the numbers don't reflect a change in the overall population of students. The world does not change quickly enough to produce those kinds of dramatic swings in the population. The difference might well be statistical noise, but we shouldn't ignore *other* kinds of changes, ones not reflecting the state of the entire world. This could be a change at one institution.

If Waterloo wanted to raise the score on its test, it could simply alter its admission standards. Colleges are constantly tweaking their admission standards. This year we want more students with athletics, or performing arts backgrounds. We're switching from formula A to formula B in scoring. We've changed admission committee chairman. All kinds of things happen. That's not counting the fact that Waterloo has *competition* that's trying to take the best students away.

Even if we administered this test to all freshmen everywhere, and knew there was a systemic population decline in the ability to achieve a passing grade, that wouldn't necessarily mean the end is nigh. We'd have to administer a *battery* of tests covering a wide variety of skills. Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).

What does the test measure anyway? The ability to compose according to one arbitrary standard of what English grammar ought to be. As useful as being able to conform to the standard dialect is for the individual, it's not the only useful skill there is, or even the most useful one to society. I'd be more concerned about declining math ability in the population, provided we could define that reasonably and measure it accurately.

Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.

Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.

I do mean "free" as in beer. Free beer is given out to make a party better, however said beer needs to either be purchased or produced, which costs money, man-power, etc. Free education is given out to make society better, although teachers need to be paid, books need to be bought, etc. I agree, though, that it's about priority. I went to a public university (University of Arizona) in the US. With a tuition of about $3,500 per semester for in-state students (roughly 5 times the €500 fee here), it was one of the cheapest universities you could find in the state. However, when the money got tight, the state opted to slash the education budget but continued to happily fund the fourth largest jail system in the world, something that, IMO, makes no sense. People in jail must be fed, clothed, sheltered etc by the State. People in college require assistance for a time, but eventually come out more educated and more capable, which would seem to be more helpful to the economy than funding a wack job sheriff [wikipedia.org] who likes to drive a tank around poor neighborhoods to intimidate people.

I feel like the general idea of university is cheaper here as well. People don't shell out hundreds of Euros per semester on books they don't want or need but nonetheless are required to buy because the prof or department has a sweetheart deal with a publisher. People live in modest student housing that costs around €190 per month with utilities and internet included rather than renting out houses and filling them with kegerators and big screen TVs. I see advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but I really think the US could learn a thing or two about saving money from paying attention to how things are here.

I am an American, you neanderthal. How likely is it that I'm just spewing anti-American "propaganda" for propaganda's sake? It's rather telling that you'd rather hear good news than reality: when you see that happen, you know a company or organization or country is not long for this world.

I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering, and that I'm around to see morons like you squander what should have made us the happiest, wealthiest, most enlightened people to have ever lived.

I'm 25. Yes, yes, our history is full of all sorts of calamities and embarrassing transgressions. But after World War II, we'd addressed most of them. We had a recessions here, and red scare there. There were the civil rights battles, and various minor wars. But for the most part, society was stable and relatively prosperous. Income inequality was low, scientific progress rapid, and social mobility high. We were respected throughout the world. The late 1970s saw stagflation, but that was the result of an exogenous supply shock, not domestic mismanagement.

The shit hit the fan around 1980, when our Gini coefficient (which measures concentration of wealth) shot through the roof. The average take-home income stagnated; two incomes become required to achieve the standard of living that could be achieved before with one. Then, finally, our political process became shrill and infantilized, and we lost the ability to respect effective to public crises.

We squandered a system that worked and replaced it with something that resembles, on paper, what we had in 1929: largely unregulated markets dominated by oligarchs with a parasitic banking sector that corrupted the political process.

Oh, and it's telling that history education in high school (or at least my high school) stops after World War II. Basically, the message is "we won and lived happily ever after."

Ostensibly, the curriculum stops there because time needs to be set aside to prepare for the New York reagents exam. But that's a flimsy excuse: we could have simply spent less time on the rather less important 1870-1890 reconstruction period. Really, the apprehension surrounding the idea of teaching politically-sensitive history was palpable, and I'm sure everyone was relieved to not have to delve into Vietnam.

So it's a bit of a cheap shot, but I can't help but quoting this sentence from your post, which later on complained about grammar:

They have kept really shitty teachers teaching and keeping standards testing to be implemented for hiring and continued employment of teachers.

As for the substantive point, I think the lack of good teachers is a bigger problem than a surplus of bad ones. It isn't like there's a long line of great teachers who are unable to find jobs, sitting impatiently behind this mass of horrible teachers that the union won't let us fire. Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).

Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.

It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.

My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.

I'm afraid this problem is wider spread than just the English-speaking world

Only this morning I heard an author and professor on the radio about a new rewritten version of the Dutch classic Max Havelaar by Multatuli.
Apparently present students can't and won't read the original due to the long sentences used and words whose meaning has changed since it was written 150 years ago.

The man had observed the attention span of his students was too short to comprehend a sentence over several lines. Words that are maybe quaint but otherwise understood by someone in his fifties are alien to them and were replaced.

I was always under the impression literature used the classics among others to train in grammar, expand our vocabulary and breed understanding for what has been. I feel this initiative is sooner sabotage than helpful.

For me it's very strange but also interesting this dumbing down of language skills has happened over such a short time span, only some 10-15 years.

"But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.

. I'd like to see some hard evidence before I agree with this statement. In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.

True. I've even seen it in books, where an obviously out of context word was substituted. It may have passed the "spell check", but certainly that should be no excuse to avoid proof-reading. It's more than just looking for an absence of little red lines under your text.

He says spelling is getting better, but grammar is getting worse. That would be perfectly consistent with using a spell checker and not realising that it's suggested a grammatically-incorrect but properly spelled word.

I don't think he's implying that people are getting better at spelling, just that the number of spelling mistakes he sees is dropping.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

I've actually noticed myself becoming extremely careful about punctuation. If you get your punctuation wrong when programming, all sorts of bad things happen. English is just a natural extension of this.

An office manager has had a bad financial year, and has to make a decision to let someone go. The newest workers are Sandra and Jack. Both have performed very well, and the manager likes them both equally. He decides, on a whim, to fire the first person that visits the water cooler on Monday morning.

Monday comes around, and the boss watches from his office. Sandra is the first to go up to the cooler. The manager goes over to her.

"Sandra", he says, "I have a tough decision to make. I have to either lay you or Jack off."

Sandra sighs as she's pouring her water. "Could you jack off?" she replies. "I feel like shit this morning."

My wife works in the public schools. I learned one thing from her. Parents claim they want schools with touch academics. However, they also wants their kids to get a 4.0, or very close to it and go apeshit when it doesn't happen. So when a school does crack down and start to grade accurately to touch academic standards, the parents go ballistic. These parents start harassing the teacher, the principal, the administrators, and the school board.

So it's no shock that these kids, of which very little was ever demanded or expected of them, should suddenly find themselves failing college once the gloves come off.

So parents apply pressure to make schools do the very thing they (allegedly) exist to do. Upon doing so they find out that the school has been not teaching their children literacy and numeracy but instead hazing their childrens minds with this years "Social Indoctrination: Experiment #5165" and go ballistic when their children fail academic tests...

What's the problem with the parents again? Oh let me guess your wife doesn't want to teach the boring stuff, like rote times table memorization, etc. Just the fun "social" stuff because she got into the job to "mold young minds" and not drill boring mathematical rules into them.

If the school doesn't teach children enough to pass these so called tough academic tests, then what the hell do children sit in the bulding for 6 hours a day for? And how in any possible reality is that the parents fault (who are allegedly pushing for tougher standards for their kids).

Teachers really do come up with some BS excuses - Parents pushing for tougher standards and demanding improvements in grades when their kids fail is apparently the problem with education. Not the school and teacher whose sole job it is to teach the children.

Um, not so much. I have taught students (college level) who failed to attend classes, handed in substandard work, and subsequently had parents call and yell at me that they were paying my salary, and consequently that their kid was entitled to pass my class.

In *college.* At a name-brand Eastern school that did OK in basketball.

At one point, I received a rather well-written communication from a parent regarding his child's grade (comp 101). I replied to his letter with a note asking him whether he considered the writing in the enclosures (copies of his child's work) acceptable.

I received an apology and encouragement to fail his child if said child continued to perform work that wouldn't be acceptable in a job setting.

It was far and away the most vindicating moment of my teaching career.

Some parents have common sense and want their kids to be smart. Some want their kids credentialed. The latter drive me crazy, esp after I received an email explaining that their child has to "get his BS at any cause." (e.g., get his degree at any cost).

I don't know what a teacher educator is, but I can tell you what my experience was in Brazilian public schools.

While getting my bachelor's in math, I used the opportunity to get a teaching license. To fulfill my internship hours I worked as an unpaid substitute teacher in public schools. It's completely obvious to me that most parents transfer the full responsibility of educating their children to the school. Every student in the top 5% of my class had at least one parent who was interested in his child's education, and held him (and not the teacher) accountable for studying and getting good grades.

Many (although not all) of these parents were electricians, plumbers, brick layers -- people with little or no formal training, but who would do their best to assist their child, while deferring to the teacher when it came to academic instruction. Without exception, these children were well mannered (in sharp contrast to the criminal behavior of the kids in the other end of the curve).

My favorite is that many in education believe there to be a causal link between parental involvement and student performance.

That's because there is a causal link, although I wouldn't call the determining factor "parental involvement". I don't care if the parent shows up at PTA meetings or at school events. I want the parent teach his child the basic concepts of accountability, honesty, politeness and discipline, and to lead by example. But that's too much to ask, because most people -- parents or not -- are lazy assholes with a sense of entitlement.

I am currently the instructor in a high school Chemistry course (at least for the day). From my experience observing the students of today across various subjects, I can say that the fault is with both the students and their parents. Our students have no work ethic, and no desire to learn. They idolize their own ignorance. The writing I see from our high school students is worse than that mentioned in the article. Even among students who score relatively well, I get the impression that I am reading a paper written by someone without native English fluency. This is, of course, when they can be made to work on any assignment to begin with. Presently, the majority of the students I am watching as I write this have elected not to open their book and participate. Instead they have chosen to engage themselves in useless, and frankly, inane and nonsensical conversation.

Equally disturbing to me is the lack of command in spoken English. These students, with few exceptions, are native English speakers, but it would be difficult to tell this from observing them. I was raised in the same town as these students, and progressed through the same education system under most of the same teachers. The curriculum has changed in the intervening time, but not enough to account for the disparity in abilities. It is honestly as if I speak different language than these students when I speak English properly. As a matter of fact, English is an entirely differently language from what they speak, and that appalls me.

Having working experience in the public education system, I can say that our problems are arising from our youth culture. The problems with our youth culture are largely due to a lack of interest or parenting ability on the part of our parents. Our students are held to no standards at home, or at least, very low standards. They have no desire to learn, and no desire to work. I try to inspire students when I have the opportunity, but results are highly limited. It is shocking and sickening when I consider that in short order these students will be adults, with responsibility in society. The difficulty with language is a symptom of the deeper problem: our students idolize willful ignorance and have chosen to be intellectually spayed. I feel that only the sobering reality we will face when we become dependent on this generation for their participation in society will shake us from our complacency and help us to insist upon higher standards for education. This effort should be maintained not only within the education system, but at home.

I previously worked for about 8 years for a medium-sized marketing and design agency, as the lead web developer. On almost every project that passed across my desk, I seemed to be the only one spotting spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and punctuation problems before copy went to the web and to print. This was in a company of 30-ish young, university educated professionals in London.

When the programmers are copy-editing your marketing material, that should be a sign you've got literacy problems!

The weird thing was that when I sent the copy back, corrected, everyone told me I was being anal - apparently not bothered about bad copy to billboards and magazines nationwide.

I agree with a commenter above, though - I think coding does encourage attention to detail when a stray semicolon becomes important.

The trend that youngsters are less and less able to write a coherent sentence seems to be a global thing. I'm not a native English speaker myself, so excuse me for any mistakes, but I'm often amazed at how incredibly bad my fellow Dutchmen write, especially on the internet.

I wonder if the decline of the paper media have got anything to do with this. Sure, books, newspapers and magazines aren't perfect or even decent at a lot things, but at least they contain (mostly) correctly written texts. People reading these texts are likely to adopt the language used, which means that if the majority of the population use these media as a source of information, they're likely to write what they read. But as the paper media are rapidly losing ground, so is correctly spelled language. On the internet, nobody checks your texts for errors in spelling or grammar, because nobody seems to care. It's all about speed instead of correctness.

I have a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and I live in the region still. One of the reasons that UW has so many people failing the ELPE (English Language Proficiency Exam), and one of the reasons it requires the test in the first place, is because of the numbers of foreign students at the university.

Waterloo has, I believe, the largest math and computer science programmes in the world. It also what is generally regarded as Canada's best engineering school. These hard science and engineering programmes attract a large number of far eastern students. When I was in school in the '90s, you'd have been more likely to hear Cantonese than English if you wandered around the Math building. I don't want to generalise, but many of these students probably come to Waterloo because they can get a great education in a programme that doesn't require them to speak perfect English, and where they have a large number of their peers.

Probably one of the reasons that Waterloo students fail the ELPE in such high numbers is that many of them are foreigners for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language. I only wish I spoke multiple languages as well as many Waterloo students speak English.

I have five kids, ranging from two college graduates to a kindergartner, and I am not at all surprised. At the risk of sounding like someone who sits on his front porch and reminisces about the good old days and walking uphill to school both ways, while waiting for kids to touch my property so I can yell at them, I firmly and insistently blame primary schools. Over the years, somehow, phonics has increased in teaching, encouraging kids to try and spell more complex words (which is fine), but does not in any way penalize them for misspelling or bad grammar. My 2nd grader routinely turns in papers with words that would be a challenge for a 6th grader, yet I don't see any red ink or corrections, telling them how to spell the word correctly. I can only attribute this three ways: 1) the teacher doesn't have the time to do it (WTF?!?!?) or 2) they don't want to actually make someone feel bad for messing up (WTF?!?!?) or 3) they just don't care. Probably a combination of all three. This is especially prevalent with my 8th grader, whose grammar is only corrected for English class, but anything else she turns in for any other class is remarkably devoid of red ink to correct spelling and grammar.

With a lack of consistent reinforcement of the basics in every class and in every setting, is it any wonder that the kids can't spell when they get to college? I recall getting points marked down in all my classes (including science classes) for misspellings, and I am stunned by the fact that somehow proper spelling and grammar is not considered something that anyone other than an English teacher should be concerned about when grading.

Recently, we allowed our teenager to get a Facebook account, with the proviso that we remain her friends and that we have access to the account. I reply to every post she makes abusively correcting her piss-poor grammar.

Any way you cut it, a consistent use of proper red ink would likely solve this issue quickly, even for high-school aged children who have learned bad habits.

"When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.

I find this part interesting. In French canadian schools, we blamed the bad grammar back in the 80s for using phonetics instead of the more traditional methods. As I was told back then, they stopped using it in France because it didn't work while we here in Canada keeped using it for some 10 years and sacrificed an entire generation as far as grammar goes.
Needless to say, we're no better off today then we were back then as the failure rates of students just keeps rising in French Canada.
I feel that the problem is that we want to find a one size fits all approach and forget that no all kids absorb knowledge the same way or at the same speed.

A quick search in the local french news turns up a fact that did not get pointed out in that article. The new and current test in French universities points to a failure of over 50% for the teachers. How can you educate when you don't know what your teaching?
I suspect this failure would be pretty high in english schools as well.
It's rather interesting that no one's bothered to point any fingers towards teachers. I wish we could stop this blame the students mentality for all failures. Teachers have they're part in this too and they need to acknowledge it.

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

"It would say to me... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

"These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations," notes Postman.

The problem I see here is that as the language degrades, so will corporations' abilities to hire people with such skills and eventually it will end up in upper management.

Item One: I teach four classes a semester in English literature and composition at a major state university. I bring home 2,000/month. Anyone choosing such a career is an idiot. I'll confess: I'm an idiot. I have a doctorate degree, a nearly-complete book manuscript, published poems, published interviews with major poets, and a chapter in a forthcoming book of literary criticism. I can't get a better job. There are simply too many people with doctorates in English. We're all idiots. Item II: My dad was a HS teacher, and anyone who will take the sort of crap he did from parents for years and years is also an idiot. He worked very hard, grading, taking night classes for further certification. We were never able to live in a better neighborhood. People were shot in our back yard. Dad got death threats for failing a football player. Item C: my wife is getting an MS in instructional technology. A couple of women in one of her courses bragged about never having found it necessary to set foot in the university library. Item IV: during my first semester here at Big Football U., I had an honors student whose grammar was so bad that I could understand about one sentence in every three. Mind you, I also have training in English as a Second Language and how to recognize the signs of disability in writing, and this young woman was an intelligent native speaker, yet her writing was still like drunken Dada raving to me. I asked her what her about her family. Her dad is an English professor at Second Rate U. over in our state capitol. Awesome. Oh, P.S.: I was a National Merit Scholar and went to university on a full-ride academic scholarship and graduated cum laude. I have wasted my talent and potential trying to teach others. I am an idiot.

Here is a simple exercise. Answer the following prompt? Can you do it? I'll post the answer in a reply.

Punctuate the following letter. You cannot remove words or letters, not can you add words or letters. The order of the words must remain the same. You can only add punctuation and capitalization when required due to punctuation. Go ahead and copy/paste this into notepad/emacs/vi. Good Luck.

================
Dear John

I want a man who knows what love is all about you are generous kind
thoughtful people who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior
you have ruined me for other men I yearn for you I have no feelings
whatsoever when we’re apart I can be forever happy will you let me be
yours

I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind,
thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior.
You have ruined me for other men! I yearn for you. I have no feelings
whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be
yours?

Gloria

Answer two:

Dear John:

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind,
thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior!
You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings
whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,

Gloria

Lesson: You think Punctuation is unimportant? You are wrong. Punctuation carried the Entire meaning of what we write. We do not have voice inflection, hand gestures or eye contact as we do when we communicate vocally. In the first letter, John is going to get laid. In the second letter, John is going to get a restraining order against him. Wouldn't it be nice for John to know what he is getting into?

Sure, language in itself is arbitrary. But our orthography, syntax, and vocabulary are very good proxies for our education and intelligence, and decision-makers quite rightly use our communicate skills to judge these traits.

Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility.

But no, that's not why we write like that: instead, it's because we're a nation of fucking imbeciles who hold education in contempt, and think of intelligence as a threat.

The particular issue is that we rely on grammatical and syntactic norms to make ourselves understood, particularly when attempting to convey complex structures of ideas. Trying to distinguish a gold-nibbed pen from a gold, nibbed pen, is a simple example. When you substitute your own grammatical norms, then you restrict your ability to convey ideas to those who share those norms. When you start to throw out grammatical constructs completely, then everybody - even those people that share your bespoke grammar - are reliant on context to understand exactly what you're trying to say. It might not even be possible for you to convey particular ideas, not to sound too Orwellian.

It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.

A rather silly complaint. If any book were written in the same way people spoke (pauses, repetitions, stuttering, incomprehension, disfluences, repetition, talking over one another, etc), it would be almost incomprehensible.

The KJV isn't meant to be spoken English per se. They hired on some of the best literary minds available in England at the time, who could also read the original Greek, Latin and Hebrew, then translated the original text and re-wrote it in literary form. Part of literature, particularly verse (poetry, song lyrics) is playing with grammar so as that while it's still recognizable, its different enough that even the form of the sentence is noticeable in addition to the actual content. So, I'm not sure I'd use the KJV as an a point any more than I would William Blake.

Now, Chaucer might be a better example as the difference between middle and modern English is substantial enough to not just be a difference between written literature and spoken vernacular. However there is a difference between the way in which phonetic units are pronounced overtime and being completely ignorant of fundamental grammatical constructs, and the inability to use the language of power has massive implications in society, both economic and political.

Loss of grammatical knowledge in the vernacular eventual brought the vulgate latin down to where it morphed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian -- but the language of the church and government remained Latin, and when the people and their rulers are separated by linguistic barriers like that, then it just leads to oppression and resentment, then eventually to revolution and upheaval, and there has been MAJOR upheaval in all of those countries even after the powerful accepted the new vernacular when high profile people, such as Dante and Cervantes began to write in it, or Chaucer -- the first major author in the English language after the Norman conquest brought French in as the language of the landed.

My degree is in literature and history, and I studied linguistics in school. I fully understand that language changes, words shift meaning, etc -- however for a democracy to function it is essential that proper education be as wide-spread as possible and that the language of the powerful not differ to greatly from the language of the proletariate, lest the gulf continue to grow. This has nothing to do with efficiency of language. It has to do with can you read the ballot and pamphlet, can you communicate in court, can you deal in the workplace, etc?

But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!

Language evolves with how people use it...... and speak it. The so-called "misuse" of grammar is kind of idiotic given that language is invented and grammar changes naturally over time.

We aren't discussing how people speak words to each-other. We're discussing how they write formal essays and tests. There is a specific syntax for these things, to ensure comprehension.

Sure, pseudocode is good for getting ideas across to other human beings and developing a rough idea of program flow... But it isn't going to compile. And it doesn't matter how much you argue that programming languages evolve over the years and get new features added and whatnot, your pseudocode still isn't going to compile.

Try reading a really old king james version of the bible. It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.

Actually, we have words for these things. Which is part of the complaint about the decline of the English language... Instead of using perfectly good words that describe exactly what you're trying to say, you borrow some other word that you already know, or stuff a bunch of random words together, and hope it conveys the right idea.

The main reason the old King James Version bibles read oddly is because they were written in Early Modern English [wikipedia.org] - a period when folks were still trying to agree on the correct spelling of words. It doesn't help matters that they intentionally avoided modern (at the time) idioms in favor of already-archaic (but more impressive) ones... Or that they were trying to find English equivalents for Latin.

Let's also face facts there are many problems with the english language in general that don't make much sense at all from the way you pronounce a vowel or word and the way it is spelled. Not to mention the strange special cases of silent consonants and the like.

All of which is carefully documented, just like the proper use of parenthesis and semicolons and whatnot is documented in a programming language.

People like efficiency, while some may think this is an expression of illiteracy others just see it as the most efficient way to express an idea.

The problem is, this isn't a matter of opinion.

In day-to-day discussion, it might be enough to say that pi = "three-ish"... But on a math test, or an engineering project, they're going to expect quite a bit more precision.

And if you're writing an essay for a college class... Or taking some kind of placement exam... Then it isn't a matter of opinion. There is a right way and a wrong way to put your words together. And if you do it wrong, you will be graded accordingly.

The problem isn't that people put words together differently when they're speaking to another human being... Or when they're writing en email to a friend... Or posting a comment on a blog... Or throwing together a text message... The problem is that people do not know how to put words together when they are taking a test or writing an essay.

It isn't a matter of choice - such as when an author deliberately emulates the speaking style of a character. It's a matter of ignorance.

It's ok to create new compound words for new ideas and technologies. It's ok to have colloquial words included in the official language because everybody uses them. It's not OK to simply encourage laziness and sloppiness under the pretext of an evolving language. Maybe fast food restaurants prefer to use a sign that says "Drive Thru" instead of "Drive Through" because the sign is smaller (and therefore cheaper). That's no excuse to use the word "thru" in a thesis.

"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)

Language is about communication. You aren't supposed to use dialect terms or syntax in publications because a lot of the people reading it won't be native speakers. You and I know what 'cuz' means, but what about the reader whose first language is French, Spanish, Hindi, or Mandarin? It works for us because we can do the phonetic transform, but a native French speaker will wonder what 'coos' is meant to be short for or mean, and will have to look it up.

The tiny fraction of a second that you save typing cuz instead of because will cause people reading your paper to have to spend several seconds looking it up. The total time wasted, if more than a few people read your paper, will be several minutes. Wasting minutes of other people's time to save you a fraction of a second is incredibly impolite.

Descriptivism coddles ignorance and laziness. It's leaning on the hands of the Idiocracy clock.

Informal speech and writing have their place... in chat rooms, in the living room and so on. But when you are at work or at school, you should put the laziness and excuses aside.

Not all change is evolution/good. The collective singular was a good change. Not knowing the difference between jealous and envious is not. That's just ignorance. Using the word decimate when you mean obliterate is ignorance. It's laziness to stay ignorant. It's laziness and cowardice to tolerate or worse yet justify it. "Poor Timmy can't tie his shoes, let's get him some velcro!" Learning to tie your shoes might be a challenge at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's easy.

We can has as the cuz we want here. But when you're at work or at school... run a fucking spell and grammar check.

The point is not that we do not know what 'cuz' means, it is that they are writing academic paper and so should realise they need to write in a formal style, as if talking to a respected elderly person (who might not understand shortened language and emoticons), and that this is not the 'formally correct' word

It is not that they are writing as they speak and txt, it is that they do not seem to realise that you should change your writing style depending on your audience

Do they also speak to their friends, parents, teachers, and at job interviews, all in the same style.... if so it will affect their job prospects, as will a lack of appropriate writing skills...

Language evolves and so does formal/informal writing, and formal/informal speaking, but they have always been different, and this is what these students seem to be lacking, written language has to more formal than spoken language or meaning is lost (you don't have the facial, body language and other non-verbal clues)

Replacing 'because' with 'cuz' is theoretically a form of language evolution. Simplifying commonly used words is an acceptable evolution, particularly when there is no risk of misinterpretation. On the other hand, inserting commas in the same way you sprinkle Parmesan cheese is not language evolution. The lack of consistency impairs the ability to convey ideas; the student which produced the writing is likely incapable of producing the same patterns of commas twice. Misplaced commas, along with poor capitalization and spelling, can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations, e.g. the panda which "Eats, shoots and leaves," or the time I "helped my uncle jack off a horse." Language evolution is different from language deterioration.